Inspired by the fact that she still remembers and also that she actually asked me to let her do some “programming”, I fired up Chipmunk BASIC on the Mac and showed her a line of instruction to let the computer “say” what you want it to say. I have shown her this in the previous lesson to give her a feel of what is involved to write a code.

This is in the form of

print "whatever"

She picks up pretty quickly.

We have to note that Anika is just starting to learn how to spell and write. So basic things like the word print, she would have to think it up in her head, sound it out and translate it to the keys on the keyboard. She also was struggling with the double quotes but after I’ve taught her how to use the delete/backspace key, she easily corrected the common mistake of using a single quote instead of a double quote or entering multiple single quotes.

Initially I started with a lot of prompting to guide her (after the first demo I did to show her how to do it). Slowly I allowed her to do it all by herself. The end result (final try) was captured in the video below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er37CeAHe5g

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGLXNyCGjZI

Awesome! I intend to repeat this lesson a few times in the next few days.

I went on after that to show her a glimpse of the first programming language that she has to learn just to reinforce the idea into her head.

• loaded a copy of ChipMunk Basic http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/
• explain to her what a double quote is and how to press it on the keyboard
• demonstrate to Anika a simple instruction using the keyword print in the syntax print “xxx” where xxx is what we want the computer to say to us
• demonstrated in front of her -- print “anika”, print “mummy”
• ask her to write a simple instruction print “anika” (Anika know’s how to spell her name at present) -- the word print is unclear to her though

She grew tired after that and wanted to do something else. I think that’s enough excitement for the day!

I’ve thought about the other programming languages and came out with a tentative list of the six programming languages that I will teach Anika.

• BASIC – The first programming language
• Objective-C (a must as this is the grand finale – iPhone App!)
• BASH – I think this is easy enough
• C – She needs to know this!
• PHP – Web programming language that is simple enough
• C# – Since I work with dudes who can code in this language and also I somehow need to use my MCPD (Enterprise) certification to do something worthwhile

I think the above is a good start to the list though one might argue that it’s too inclined towards C based languages. Doesn’t matter. At least I have one tick against my todo list! We are trying to be agile here!

section	.text
    global _start		;must be declared for linker (ld)

_syscall:			;system call
	int	0x25
	ret

_start:				;tell linker entry point

	push	dword len	;message length
	push	dword msg	;message to write
	push	dword 1		;file descriptor (stdout)
	mov	eax,0x3		;system call number (sys_write)
	call	_syscall	;call kernel
	add	esp,12		;clean stack (3 * 4)

	push	dword 0		;exit code
	mov	eax,0x3f	;system call number (sys_exit)
	call	_syscall	;call kernel
				;no need to clean stack
section	.data

msg	db	"Hello, world!",0xa	;our dear string
len	equ	$ - msg			;length of our dear string

Hmm… don’t think it’ll be easy to teach my daughter the above!

The thought come about when I remembered how I started programming when I was 9 years old and wondered if I can teach my daughter how to program. Of course I believe that my daughter can be better than me hence the challenge that I put myself to (and her) is to be able to code in 6 different programming languages before she turns 6.

The plan is simple.

1) Choose 6 different programming languages

2) Teach her the very hight level concept of programming a computer

3) Coach her to write Hello World in each of the programming language one by one

4) At the end of it all, the grand finale is to work with her on an extremely simple iPhone application project (maybe a simple RSS browser to this blog itself) and launch it in the App Store.

5) Do all the above before she turn 6.

Of course, that’s the plan but things may very well change along the way! I intend to record my (and her) joy, frustrations and achievement in this blog along with a series of YouTube videos so at some stage, this will become a case study for teaching young ones to program!

Let the fun begin!